ight lets get it.
RNG AND WHY ITS A BIGGER PROBLEM FOR OLIMAR THAN IT LOOKS:
1. we're in a fast paced fighting game, not brawl. a common misconception about olimar is that he doesnt work in a fast paced smash game like pm because hes "campy" but thats not necessarily the case. olimar's playstyle in pm isnt exactly campy, its simply defensive. i would define olimar camping as him throwing and plucking pikmin until he has a lineup that is best for him, and THAT playstyle doesnt work in pm. you simply do not have enough time to farm for a lineup that is good for your matchup.
2. pikmin are well balanced around each other and that means that rng is even worse for olimar. since pikmin have so much extreme properties like whites doing a ton of damage on side b but with extremely low health and knockback, or purples having so much knockback and health but low range on fsmash, grab and side b, olimar is ****ed more than he is in smash 4 or brawl when he doesnt get the pikmin he wants for the matchup. because pikmin are designed to be good against specific characters and bad against others, and thats a great thing. if you wanted rng to not be a problem, you would have to normalize the pikmin so much that the differences between them are almost unnoticable.
3. purples are very very important and you can get no purples or two purples and become a tiny ganon with a projectile that converts into everything. if you get no purples, you are essentially pivot fsmashing instead of side b-ing and killing only through gimps or high% kill throws with blue. there is always a chance you will never ever pluck a purple, i've had matches where i pluck at least 25 times and get 0 purples, and it does effect your matchups, which brings up my next point.
4. matchups get much better and much worse depending on your lineup. this is my biggest grope with rng. it makes olimar so damn hard to place on a tier list because his mu spread is so based around getting a good enough lineup. for example, most rushdown characters have trouble against the lineup of yellows and purples, because you can throw the yellows and stop them from dash dancing and when they approach you can stuff their options with a pivot fsmash or a purple side b. this makes olimar super unreliable and can help or hurt him in unfair ways. if olimar gets perfect rng every match, which is never going to happen, he would have one of the best matchup spreads in the game and lose to maybe 2 characters TOPS, but if he gets the worst possible rng he becomes the worst character in the game. this gives him a metric **** ton of even matchups that can go either way due to rng.
now that i've explained why rng is a bad idea, let me explain how i think we should fix it.
COMMON IDEAS TO FIX RNG THAT I THINK WOULD HURT THE CHARACTER:
1. set order. this is a big one that i have argued endless times for hours and hours on end and i cant stress how poor of an idea it is. this will hurt olimar more than help him, and i would rather have rng than this. it essentially means you are going to have to stall and play the waiting game to get the lineup you want, and stocks go so fast in this game that it can all just blow away any second, all it really does is distract you from playing the game. pikmin farming is a technique that should be kicked out from olimar's gameplay. we should not have to limit ourselves from playing the actual game because we want to win the matchup. ivysaur gets solarbeam by attacking people, why cant we have something similar so we dont have to farm? all pikmin farming does is kill olimar's gameplay by forcing him to sit at one side of the stage and hope the opponent doesnt rush him down. and set order will promote farming in the most tedious way. lets say that the order of plucking is something like red, yellow, blue, white, purple. you start off the game with no purple, and you throw the pikmin you dont want and pluck a purple. guess what, any character in the game is fast enough to punish you doing that. olimar is offstage and youre probably dead. not only that, it makes it nearly impossible to get duplicate pikmin, one of the most important things in some matchups. double reds give you comebacks, double purples let you beat rushdown characters (or jigglypuff) and double yellows with a purple help you a ton against characters with disjoint. if you want two of the same pikmin, you will have to pick a stage with a low bottom blastzone- wait did i mention that yet? the speed of farming is also based off of HOW LOW THE BOTTOM BLASTZONE IS ON THE STAGE meaning that if we want to have a set order or any type of plucking that promotes farming we have to not go to dreamland or delfino's because that essentially doubles the time farming takes. really really bad idea. anyway, if you want two of the same pikmin, you have to pick a stage with a low bottom blast zone, pray your opponent's controller isnt working or that you get a lucky sky ko and then MAYBE if youre lucky you will get a duplicate. farming is unintuitive and not fun for either players during a match. it makes olimar unnecessarily campy and it doesn't add anything special to his gameplay. farming is not an essential part of olimar and it really needs to go, all it is doing is hindering him.
2. olimar chooses what pikmin he gets with either taunts or by pressing the neutral b with a different direction after it. choosing what pikmin you get for essentially doing nothing is an AWFUL idea, and even if you add limitations to it like you cant have duplicate pikmin (bad idea) it still makes him a ridiculous character to play against. you should be rewarded with a pikmin by doing something healthy for the game, not just pressing a button and a direction on the dpad.
3. olimar has every kind of pikmin and pikmin are immortal. completely ignoring the laws of coding that this violates, this is a bad idea. this means that olimar can get no duplicates, has to have the same combos in a certain order and is stuck with the same lineup. it also removes the cool counterplay olimar's pikmin have and honestly would just be boring and not interesting at all. bad idea
MY IDEA TO FIX RNG AND WHY I THINK IT WORKS FOR OLIMAR:
i made a reddit post with the same idea way back in late 3.0 or early 3.5 but i'll reiterate it here.
olimar starts out the game with the lineup of red, yellow, red, yellow. when you use pluck, olimar only plucks reds and yellows in that order. the way you can pluck other pikmin is by using the ability theyre the best at. if you hit a smash attack 3 times, your antennae briefly flashes purple and your next pluck is a purple pikmin. if you grab twice, your antennae flashes blue and you get a blue pikmin on your next pluck. if you throw a pikmin at somebody and it latches onto them, your antennae flashes white and your next pluck is a white pikmin. if you do not pluck in the next 10 seconds after doing one of these things, the pikmin goes away and youre back to plucking yellows or reds. some other things i would change to olimar that would balance this idea is to not let olimar have more than two purples, and rework the flowering system so pikmin dont flower over time, they flower when you hit the opponent a certain amount of times with that pikmin. that idea isn't thought out to much by me and i dont think it would be essential to this character, so im fine with it if someone tells me its a bad idea. i probably agree.
now why do i think this method will make olimar a better character to play and play against? well as i mentioned before, olimar shouldnt be rewarded with a pikmin he needs in the matchup by just plucking, he should do something that works in the matchup. for example, against a rushdown character like fox, i want to pivot fsmash or usmash him out of shield or straight up combo him, so i hit him with a bunch of smash attacks. sweet, i got a purple! now i can stuff his nair approaches and beat his projectile that my pikmin couldnt. what if im playing against a campy character like zelda? i cant approach her, she teleports away or just lightning kicks me every time i do, so i have to throw pikmin and make her respect them. the best way of doing this is getting a pikmin that does 40% damage on leafed side b, which is a white. so i throw a pikmin at her and get a white. she is now forced to do a laggy move which gets the pikmin off of her. this method gives olimar players an incentive to play the matchup the way it was meant to be played.
why should olimar only pluck yellows and reds? mostly because they're the most "neutral" of the pikmin. while they do have attributes that are better than others (red has the best damage and yellow is the fastest and has the most range) they dont exactly have attributes that make or break matchups. they can kill, gimp, combo, and theyre good enough in neutral to the point where its just enough to not become better than the others. they are a healthy medium that doesn't limit you too much.
ARGUMENTS PEOPLE USUALLY HAVE AGAINST THIS IDEA:
1. its too complicated: im gonna reason with you real quick. we are talking about olimar. you think anyone can just figure out all of the **** that olimar has without going on forums or just grinding him out in the lab for an extremely long time? olimar players wont exactly look at this of all things and say "this is too complicated for me to play olimar" because we are playing the most complicated character in the game. its really hard to imagine an olimar player that will quit his character because hes too complicated because of this. if this was implemented it still wouldnt be the most complicated part of olimar. plus, theres a big antennae on his head that would flash the color you would pluck. noticing basic patterns like that are things that humans have been doing forever. its really hard for me to think that this would be too complicated for olimar players.
2. it makes olimar predictable: i actually think the opposite. someone can go into a match thinking "hes probably going to do this because he wants that certain kind of pikmin" but thankfully, olimar can combo people and all of these things can combo into each other. want a white but your opponent keeps dodging side b? run up to them and hit them. end the combo with a fair and boom, you get a free side b. want a blue but your opponent is side stepping your grabs? side b them and punish them hitting the pikmin off them with a grab, then combo into a regrab. olimar's moveset beautifully flows into itself and this system adds a great level of mixups into olimar's gameplan.
3. the antennae would confuse people that look at it to see what pikmin he has: this one i can actually see being a problem sadly. i wouldnt think the flash on the antennae lasts too long but it still could be a problem. with that said, **** the antennae. i knew what pikmin i had in my lineup by dash dancing i dont need no special effects.
if theres anything else i missed just quote me on it, feel free to argue.